The Map of the Sky (72 page)

His head spinning, Charles staggered back to his cell. He had no strength left for anything else, he told himself, and in some sense this relieved him of the burden he had felt since seeing Claire’s naked body floating in the tank and wondering if he should tell Captain Shackleton his wife was dead. He was aware that by doing so he would take away the only thing that kept Shackleton alive. But didn’t the captain also deserve some respite? Charles, with a few words, could grant him the right to surrender, to lay down his arms. Why did he not tell him, then? These doubts had been gnawing away at him all night. In the end dawn had
come and he still hadn’t made a decision. No matter how hard he tried to convince himself he hadn’t the strength to go to Shackleton’s cell, this paltry excuse did little to dispel his feelings of remorse. Weak as he was, he resolved he would make it over to where the captain was to tell him what he had seen, thus releasing him from his pointless purgatory. No doubt, when the captain discovered that Claire was inside the pyramid, he would try to go down there and the shackle would instantly begin to throttle him, to kill him even, if he persisted. But what did that matter now? Clearly there would never be an uprising, Charles reflected with bitterness; the Martians would be the lords and masters of the Earth. Things had gone much too far for anyone to be able to put them right. Their doomed planet no longer had any need of a hero. And so Charles decided the time had come to offer Captain Shackleton his freedom, the only freedom to which Man could now aspire: that of deciding whether he wanted to go on living. Filled with this resolve, Charles turned around and stumbled toward the barracks where his friend’s cell was, on the other side of the camp.

However, he was weaker than he thought. The captain was forced to interrupt the exercises he was doing at the entrance to his cell when he saw Charles collapse a few yards from the barracks. He leapt down the steps, hoisted Charles’s limp body onto his shoulders, and carried him back to his cell, where he laid him out on his pallet with the gentleness of an embalmer. Then he placed his hand on Charles’s burning brow and realized he was too far gone for him to do anything: Charles would die within minutes. Shackleton sat beside him and clasped his hand. The young man appeared slowly to regain consciousness, groaning softly, his eyes struggling to focus on Shackleton.

When it appeared they had, Charles whispered, “I’m dying, Captain . . .”

The captain gave him a look of commiseration and pressed his hand but remained silent. Charles cleared his throat with a painful rasp and began.

“I’m sorry I took you away from Claire that afternoon,” he said with
difficulty. “I’m so sorry it was all for nothing. I should have let you spend those last hours together. They were yours, and I took them from you. I regret it more than you could know, Captain. But I promise I didn’t do it out of spite or on a whim. I truly believed you were destined to defeat the Martians. It was written, remember?” Charles tried to smile at his own joke but only managed a pathetic rictus of pain. “And I still don’t understand why it didn’t happen, why the future you came from will not exist, even though both of us have seen it.”

Shackleton shifted uneasily in his chair but did not break his silence.

“Luckily, I don’t have much time to keep on asking myself why nothing turned out the way it was supposed to, and I suppose I’ve more than paid for all the wrong or mistaken things I may have done in my life. I’m so tired, Derek . . . all I want now is to rest . . .” Charles stared blankly at Shackleton as though a mist had descended between them, obscuring him. “And you must do the same, Derek . . . Yes, you must admit defeat, Captain. You’ve nothing left to fight for, my friend. Not anymore. I have to tell you something . . .”

Charles was seized by a sudden fit of coughing, causing his body to jerk on the pallet as several mouthfuls of blood oozed down his chin and neck, staining his skin an oily green. The captain hurriedly sat him up so he wouldn’t choke on his own blood, holding him until the coughing subsided and gazing at him with infinite sorrow. When he had recovered, Charles closed his eyes, exhausted, and Shackleton once more laid him gently down. His breathing was so slight that for a moment the captain thought Charles had passed away, but when he moved his face close to his friend’s bloodstained lips, he could feel his breath, light and fleeting, like the shadow of a dragonfly on the water. Shackleton looked at him for a few moments and shook his head slowly. Then he got up and walked over to the table on the opposite side of his cell.

“Captain Shackleton! Derek!” Charles called out suddenly, eyes wide open, frantically searching for his friend in the darkness slowly closing in around him. “Where are you, Derek? I can’t see, I can’t see . . . everything’s gone black . . . Derek!”

The captain remained motionless for a moment, his back to Charles, his shoulders hunched, as though he were carrying an immense weight. At last, he took something from the table, went back over to the bed, knelt beside the dying man, and began to speak to him, his powerful hands caressing the object.

“Listen, Charles. I, too, have something to tell you,” he said solemnly. “Much has happened during the three days since I last saw you. While you were inside the pyramid, I was in the women’s camp—and I have some news. Important news.”

Charles attempted to interrupt in a thin voice. “Derek, there’s something I have to tell you . . .”

“Hush, my friend! Don’t talk, save your strength, and listen to me,” the captain insisted. “They brought a new batch of women from the Continent. And I was able to speak to some of them, Charles. They told me the Martians are having serious problems over there. Resistance groups have sprung up in France, Italy, Germany, and many other countries. Everyone is talking about a group of strange soldiers armed with powerful weapons. Yes, Charles, weapons no one has ever seen before, weapons almost as technologically advanced as the Martians’. And these soldiers move from camp to camp, freeing the prisoners, arming them, training them. And they are growing in strength and number. It is rumored they will soon arrive in England. And do you know what else they are saying, my friend? That these soldiers are searching for their captain, that they’ve come from the future to rescue him.”

“From the future? Oh, heavens, Captain! But how can that be?” Charles managed to murmur, filled with wonder, afraid of surrendering to this miracle, to the intense joy threatening to engulf him and sweep away his pain.

“I don’t know, Charles. I’m wondering that myself.” Shackleton let out a loud guffaw, still mysteriously fondling the object he was holding. “But clearly these are my men, Charles. They are coming to save me, to save us. How could they have found out what was happening in the past? I don’t know. As I told you, in the future we have time machines
that are different from the
Cronotilus.
The one I used to get here was destroyed, but who knows, maybe there were others I didn’t know about, and maybe other travelers saw the beginning of the invasion and went back to the future to raise the alarm.”

“But if that’s the case,” Charles protested, making a superhuman effort to raise his voice so the captain could hear him, “then why did they take so long? And why did they turn up on the Continent and not here?”

For a few moments Shackleton remained pensive.

“I don’t know, my friend,” he said suddenly, recovering his enthusiasm, “but I can assure you that’s the first thing I’ll ask my brave men when I see them! Oh yes, Charles, you can count on it! I’ll say to them, ‘What the hell have you been doing while I, your captain, was rotting away in here? Baboons! Devil’s spawn! Sodomizing one another? Impregnating your own mothers? Or do you suppose we’ve been enjoying ourselves in here, sons of bitches?’ Yes, that’s what I’ll say. I can hear them laughing already,” declared the captain, and he began to guffaw loudly. Charles felt his own lips forming a smile, exposing his naked gums, as he began to accept as true the captain’s incredible story.

“But . . . are you sure, my dear fellow?” he asked. “Can you trust these women?”

“Of course, Charles. Look at this,” Shackleton said, placing in his friend’s hands the mysterious object he had been holding. Charles fondled it blindly, allowing the captain to guide his fingers. “One of them brought me this. It’s from my time, it’s a . . . well, we call it a marker. I knew what it was as soon as she gave it to me.”

“What is it?” Charles’s voice was scarcely audible now.

“We would use them after the battle to find survivors buried under the rubble. We all wore one around our neck. I took mine off before I traveled here, so as not to arouse suspicion among the people in your time. But now, thanks to that brave woman, I have this one. Many of the women who had escaped from the camps let themselves be recaptured, their mission to smuggle these markers in under their clothing and find me to give me one of them. And now I’m going to activate it
and hide it under my clothing, Charles. That means my soldiers will reach me as soon as they land in England. It will only be a matter of months, my friend, possibly even weeks. But they will come, Charles, they will come. And that will be the end of the Martians. We’re going to defeat them, my friend.”

“To defeat them . . . ,” Charles repeated with a groan.

“Yes, Charles, we’re going to defeat them.” The captain stroked his dying friend’s thinning hair, plastered to his brow, then he gently retrieved the object from Charles’s hands, which fell limply to his sides. His breathing was scarcely more than a rapid murmur now. “You were right, my friend. You were right all along. We’re going to defeat them, because
we’ve already defeated them.
”

Because we’ve already defeated them,
Charles heard as he crossed the murky threshold of oblivion. Yes, they were going to reconquer the Earth, he thought feverishly. He had been right all along, the captain had just said so. Yes, of course he’d been right, how could he ever have doubted himself? He had seen the future, he had been to the year 2000, and the brave Captain Shackleton had been there, defeating the king of the automatons, and there were no Martians, no . . . Claire. Charles’s breathing quickened. Claire, he remembered. Claire was in the depths of the pyramid. Yes, she was there, dead, or worse. Floating in that repulsive green liquid. He had seen her, and he had to tell Shackleton, that’s why he’d come to his cell, to free him. But he couldn’t tell him now! he told himself, bewildered. If the captain discovered his wife was dead, it would destroy him. He wouldn’t care about his men or saving the human race. Charles knew this because he had seen him before: Shackleton’s love for his wife had changed him from a hero into a man, a man who wouldn’t want to live in a world without his beloved in it. He would find a way to take his own life, and his men would arrive too late to stop him. And what would happen then? Would the uprising continue without Shackleton? Would his men save the planet without their brave captain, without the man who had rescued the world where they came from in the future? Charles did not know, but he could not risk allowing
that to happen. And besides, what if by doing so he changed everything, caused one of those rents in the fabric of time that Murray had warned against? Could that happen?

Charles searched hard for an answer amid the increasingly murky shadows filling his mind, but his thoughts became tangled, forming a confused mass: the future—which he had seen, and which could thus be considered the past—and the present, in which he lived, had lost their natural order and been rearranged in a way that seemed odd, though the fact was he couldn’t be sure of that either. Could the captain, who was meant to defeat Solomon, die inside the pyramid without the order of the universe being destroyed? Too confused, Charles resolved to remain silent, for fear of spoiling everything. The captain had to carry on hoping he would find Claire one day, he had to fight, driven on by this hope. Yes, he had to save the Earth and safeguard the future, the future where he would, once more, meet Claire for the first time, and from whence he would travel to be with her, to fall in love with her over and over again, to lose her over and over again, and to search for her forever, and no one must ever take away his hope of finding her, for the human race needed him to be lonely and sad, forever dreaming he would find his Claire.

Charles turned his head toward where he sensed vaguely the captain was and made a couple of grotesque faces before managing to produce the smile with which he wanted to accompany his joke.

“Because it’s written . . . ,” he managed to say, thrusting forever from his mind the naked body of Claire Haggerty, whom no one would rescue from the depths of the pyramid.

As he did so, Charles realized that his role in this story was none other than the deceiver, the king of deceivers, the trickster, the man whose task it was to conceal the truth from the hero so that he could go on being one. Yes, his role had been that of the man who lied to safeguard the future. And, embracing this minor role Fate had reserved for him, Charles Winslow allowed the darkness to penetrate him and his soul to dissolve into the void.

Captain Shackleton contemplated Charles for a few moments, then he reached out and gently closed his eyelids, giving his friend the appearance of finally being at rest, his ravaged face bathed in a deserving and infinite peace. He picked up the remains of the wax candle he had been pressing in his fingers while he was speaking, molding it into a shape that Charles, in his confusion, could believe was the marker that proved the existence of an army of the future that was coming to find him. Then he placed it on the table, wondering whether Ashton might get him another candle stub the following day, and whether it would be long before Charles’s shackle activated itself and marched him off to the funnel, or whether he would have to lay his body on the floor so that he could sleep on the pallet. He needed to sleep. At dawn they would once more take him over to the women’s camp, and he wanted to be as rested as possible, because, who could tell, tomorrow might be the day when at last he found Claire.